Horror films as of late, in the American sense, have been failing. They are derivative, reliant on cheap thrills, empty shocks, and boring. Hollywood has easily lost touch with horror’s core fan base and rather than coming out with new material, they are merely recycling the old films and retelling them, often in sub-par quality standards.
At the moment, the fact that even the likes of “torture-porn” type horror films like Saw and Hostel, really aren’t scary – shocking but not scary – is a frightening ordeal in itself. The original Saw was intriguing and powerful due to the fact that there was an actual story to back up the gore. The sequels that followed, however, did the normal “let’s do the exact same thing, but change the names and throw out the story” problem that plagues most horror movie sequels. Hostel, though an interesting premise for a movie, didn’t have much to it, except the gore factor and the exhibition of brutality that humans can do to each other.
The things that made the American horror film frightening just aren’t there anymore. These things haven’t been around, at least in a strong way, since 1987 with Hellraiser. That film wasn’t even an American horror film, but since the British director who filmed it in Northern London is now an American movie producer I will include it. While there still are good “horror” movies, they often end up being a failed amalgamation of all the previous horror movie stereotypes and clichés.
Most non-horror movies, like Children of Men and United 93, often end up being more frightening and hard-hitting than the modern horror movies released as of late. It’s heartbreaking to see Wes Craven come out with a political thriller, which features a plot based on assassination (Red Eye) that is scarier than most current horror movies.
Where are the heroes of horror that revitalized and brought respect to the genre? It is time for minds like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George Romero or Alfred Hitchcock to run wild and free again because it is necessary to save the art of scaring people. They at least realized that what they were doing was in some way artistic and didn’t demean it by making it the base form of entertainment that some people and critics regard horror as. Well Wes Craven did demean the art purposefully for the Scream trilogy to prove a point about how bad and predictable horror is now.
Sure there might not be original ideas, but that doesn’t mean the public isn’t deserving of quality films. Don’t drown horror in a flood of garbage, like House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, Darkness Falls and most of the other American horror drivel out there.
We can even take cues from the Asian and European directors and throw out the stereotypes altogether. Sure, a lot of their stories are tired and overused, but there are still ways to make them interesting. For one thing they add in a certain level of mythology to the stories to set the mood, which actually helps build tension and make films frightening AND compelling.
Part of the problem is that studios, rather than taking a risk, enjoy taking the coward’s way out. They stick to franchises until they’ve been done to death, and then do it thrice more. The mainstream portion of the film industry and big studios love to recycle until there’s nothing left of that dead horse to beat.
It would be cruel of me to put all the blame on the studios. It is the public that the big studios are trying to put films out for. It’s supply and demand for a population of easily pleased, undeserving dullards who don’t want to think when seeing a movie. It’s for the kind of people who wouldn’t know the art of horror if it were bleeding on their face. To them, horror is supposed to only be shocking. It’s merely supposed to make you jump a little in your seat and maybe look away from screen in revulsion for a couple of seconds every once in a while. WRONG! If anything, horror is the true thinking man and woman’s genre. It ideally deals with the unknowns of any aspect of life the screenwriter and director wishes to cover, which has to be presented intelligently for the right results. The right result is to have a film that resonates with or, even better yet, haunts the audience. Without intelligence or a sense of logic, this right result is nearly impossible to achieve.
Come on Hollywood. You can do it. All you need to do is use your minds with the willingness to take a risk, and even the most overdone, predictable story can be turned into a fear fest that would bring the genre new life.
Jonathan Gronli can be reached at jon.gronli@gmail.com